Youth prisons are ineffective and should have closed long before the coronavirus hit

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced plans to close the state’s youth prisons system — the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) — leaving it to counties to house youth adjudicated of the most serious offenses.

There’s no doubt that closing DJJ — once the nation’s largest and most brutal youth prison system — is an important step forward. However, we must close these facilities thoughtfully to ensure that vulnerable children within them receive the services they need, that the harms of DJJ are not replicated on a county level and that youth in DJJ are not shipped to adult prisons.

California’s legislature has added several important elements to Gov. Newsom’s call to close DJJ. Their budget proposal would provide counties resources to support evidence-based services, including smaller secure regional facilities centered on improving public safety while building on youths’ strengths. It would create an Office of Youth Justice within the Health and Human Services Agency to provide oversight for youth correctional facilities and engage in robust planning, data-collection and quality assurance — all long overdue in California. Finally, it would incentivize counties to keep kids out of adult prisons, where their safety is jeopardized and outcomes are far worse.

California finds itself amid growing national efforts to end youth prisons. Recently over 70 elected prosecutors and youth correctional administrators called for the closure of youth prisons throughout the nation, highlighting ways these facilities perpetuate inequities and cycles of crime, waste taxpayer money and harm young people. These leaders have worked tirelessly to reduce the number of young people sent to facilities with barbed wire and aggressive roving guards that strip them of humanity, while increasing access to supportive services. Ultimately, they have come to the conclusion that youth prisons cannot be improved sufficiently to justify their existence and have come together to say that we must stop tinkering around the edges — the time has come to close these facilities.

The need for bold, but thoughtful, action now is underscored by twin crises: COVID-19 and the mounting outcry to address racial injustices.

In response to COVID-19, California paused admissions to DJJ. Nationwide, youth detention admissions have been reduced by more than half in just two months. This reduction shows us what is possible when leaders feel urgency to act. But with COVID-19 cases nearly doubling recently in DJJ, more must be done, especially when the pandemic is curtailing access to school and rehabilitative programming for youth who remain behind bars.

The need to end youth prisons existed long before COVID-19. Youth prisons are ineffective — the worst possible action we can take is to congregate youth with problem behaviors in an institutional setting, separate them from teachers and relatives, and take away hope. Youth prisons also carry the stain of racism, with Black, Indigenous and Latinx youth incarcerated at five, three and 1.7 times the rate of white youth, respectively. Youth prisons are brutal environments, with widespread sexual assaults, violence and neglect. It is no wonder that individuals exiting these places have abysmally high rates of rearrest.

Our call for closing youth prisons does not mean that we believe no youth should ever be removed from the community. Young people should not get a free pass when they break the law, but they should be held accountable in ways that make them less, not more, likely to re-offend. Traditional youth prisons are associated with a host of bad outcomes, leading to educational, health and economic deficiencies paid — by all of us — well into adulthood.

Fortunately, more effective community-based models that build on strengths of neighborhoods and families exist, and jurisdictions that have embraced these approaches, like New York City and Washington D.C., have seen large reductions in youth crime. But scaling up these types of programs and the capacity to meaningfully engage youth — even those who have committed serious offenses — will require resources, oversight and a commitment to innovation.

As states face unprecedented budget shortfalls, we must be thoughtful about how resources are spent. It now regularly costs more to send a young person to prison for a year than to pay for four years at Harvard. Considering youth prisons’ dismal outcomes and high costs, states could hardly make a poorer investment.

In this moment, there is ample incentive to close these giant monuments to failure, but we must ensure that savings follow youth back to their communities to create conditions for success. Affected families and communities must play a central role in that process, and moving youth to the adult system or recreating prisons on the county level is not the solution.

Now is the time to heed the collective call from experts to chart a better pathway forward for our youth, as well as our communities. California’s thoughtful road map for how that vision should be implemented models that pathway.

This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.